Teen asylum-seekers face a tough Home Office

"Arguably outrageous" is how Mr Justice Collins described the behaviour of officials from the Home Office's Border and Immigration Agency (BIA).

They arrived at four in the morning at the foster home of a 15-year-old Iraqi asylum claimant in order to bundle him onto a plane out of Britain.

But the officials' behaviour wasn't "arguably" outrageous. It was outrageous.

The knock at the door at 4am is a favourite technique of police states. Even supposing there are circumstances that make its use legitimate in a law-governed democracy, it was clearly grotesque in this instance: the "target" was a child whose only offence was to have claimed asylum in Britain rather than Austria, the country that was his point of arrival in the EU.

The BIA has not said anything to justify its behaviour. A spokesperson from the Home Office told me it would be "inappropriate, given the outstanding court case" (the Iraqi boy's lawyers are seeking judicial review of the decision to deport him) for the agency to comment on its actions.

But she was able to say that under the Dublin Agreement on asylum cases in the EU, someone asking for asylum is legally obliged to make their claim in the EU nation in which they first arrive; and if they fail to do that, instead making their claim in a different country, then that country is entitled to deport the claimant to the "point of first arrival" in the EU.

All perfectly true. But none of it justifies banging down the door at 4am, taking a terrified 15-year-old from his foster carers and shoving him on a plane to Vienna.

In its eagerness to get "J" - as the Iraqi boy is known - out of Britain, the BIA neglected to tell the Austrian authorities that they would henceforth be responsible for his care. So after one night in an Austrian police station, J had to spend three days and nights shivering and starving on the streets until finally a place was found for him at an adult hostel.

It is not an example of treating children with "the utmost sensitivity and care", which is what the BIA claims to do. It is an example of the bungling inefficiency that too often characterises the BIA.

Its officials had known of J's arrival in the UK since April, and had tried to visit him in May, but J had not been at his address when they called.

They then seem to have forgotten about him for nearly seven months, so that by the time they went back at 4am on November 8, the six-month time limit on removals in such cases had expired. That fact alone, said the judge, made the removal of the boy unlawful.

The BIA's outrageous behaviour was wholly, and foreseeably, counter-productive: J will now have to be brought back to the UK, and will probably end up having his claim for asylum here approved. So why did they do it?

Like a person who returns home from a humiliating day at the office and takes out his fury by kicking his pet dog or shouting at his children, the BIA's officials probably picked on J because he was the nearest available object on which to vent their frustration at their own organisation's failures.

And there are a lot of those. More than 20,000 children under 18 have arrived in Britain to claim asylum over the past few years: the Home Office won't say how many of those claims have been refused, still less how many children have been deported.

Other agencies such as social and health services often refuse to co-operate with the BIA's attempt to identify and remove failed child asylum seekers. It makes the job of enforcing the law doubly difficult, and they mostly fail.

There is a backlog of at least 200,000 people whose claims for asylum have been investigated and found to be without merit, but who have not left Britain. Many of them will not only never be removed: they will get their families into Britain, under the "right to family" reunion enshrined in the Human Rights Act.

In asylum law, two wrongs make a right: if you can get here and stay here, you get the right to bring your family here.

That's one reason why, as The Sunday Telegraph reported last week, the Home Office has been operating a scheme that bribes failed asylum applicants to leave Britain, offering cash awards totalling up to £4,000 to persuade them to go away.

The scheme's defenders say it saves on court costs, which it does. But it also encourages people to make baseless claims for asylum, to take the money and then to come back and try again.

We need a tough asylum policy: one that makes sure that the law is enforced fairly and effectively. But this should not be confused with a brutal, inhumane one enforced by officials who behave in outrageous fashion.

At the moment, however, we are getting the worst of both worlds: a feeble, ineffective policy, coupled with occasional bouts of outrageous behaviour from the officials charged with enforcing it.